I had a very interesting conversation with a few folks from the lists
about something that came up on the beta list.
It had to do with the feedback system and how it might be made more
useful to REAL and us as users.
I understand that the number of "requests" on a report is seen as
"votes" by a number of members of the community but that is NOT what
it really is.
It's simply that you are interested in the report along with X many
others.
As such it can lead to misunderstandings and perhaps some
frustrations in the community when reports that have lots of "votes"
get passed over for one that has fewer "votes".
While the number of requests for a report is one measure of the
number of people it affects or that are interested in the report, it
might not accurately gauge the level of interest by the members of
the community.
If one report has 10 requests and another has 10 requests they seem
"equal".
But, if each person who had signed on to the report could indicate
their "interest" in the report you might find that all 10 rank one
report of very high interest and the other very low.
This might help REAL get a better feel for the actual interest the
members of the community have for a particular report.
Now, some people are going to say all of their reports are of high
priority and others will actually use this kind of ranking as intended.
Since REAL still eventually determines the actual items that get
worked on all this would do is skew the "interest level" indication.
So, how to remove that ability to game the system ?
If everyone gets a fixed number of "tokens" that they can "spend" on
reports, then that fixed number of tokens forces a person to attach a
priority to those items that are the most important to them.
Yes they could spend all of them on one report but that might be
balanced out by others raking it very low.
And, when a report is fixed you get your tokens back that you spent
on it to spend on another.
If you change your mind and want to reprioritize you can recover
those tokens by lowering your interest level or no longer watching
the report.
But the number of tokens is always fixed.
For my list of reports this would help as I have a number that I
would like to tell REAL are very low priority and a few that I'd love
to have some way to say this is very important to me.
Presently I do not have a way to do this.
IF you have an interest in such a proposal the report to sign on to
is http://www.realsoftware.com/feedback/viewreport.php?reportid=dmfilkyp
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